Hi I have come accross this forum while googling for help
I already wrote a looong question but sitedecided to delete it so I will keep this short
I am moving to Asia from Uk
cant take my dvds with me so I want to make avis out of them,how?
I have Ideal dvd to avi
what codec should I use and what settings? res/bitrate/etc?
I have used many programs and wasted my time,the results are always awful
if I downloaded an avi,the quality will be awsome at 800mb so it is possible.
also the Iomega Screenplay doesnt seem to play files exceeding ( I think ) 1.4gb?
a real pain in the arse because many downloaded avis exceed this and if you try to get quality while making an avi the size will exceed this too
help,how do I get the screenplay to play all avis
and how do I make quality avis?

There are quite a number of good dvd to avi converters available, including tools like AutoGK, StaxRip, Xvid4PSP and FairUse Wizard (free for the lite version). You can find downloads for them at videohelp.com
Any of these should produce good quality, but I’d recommend AutoGK first. It has been around a long time, its made to be simple to use, and there are plenty of guides for it at videohelp.com as well. All of these are free to use by the way, except for the advanced version of FairUse Wizard.

You’ll need to decrypt and rip the dvd movies to the hard drive in your computer first. Its much faster than trying to encode from the optical drive. For that I recommend AnyDVD or DVDFab. There are free trials for both of them.

It looks like your player cannot support H264 encoding, so you need to stick with divx or xvid for the video codec.

hmmm,I gave up using autogk because it was too slow and gave bad results
including water margins in the avis
Ideal dvd to avi runs fine and quicker from the optical drive.
im not sure what h264 is,I have divx and xvid codecs tho not sure which to use
one of theproblems being that the screenplay doesnt play the xvid/divx encoded avis ?
how do I get the file size down and the quality up?
and the screenplay to play these files?
seems to be a common problem

Frankly, I rarely hear of AutoGK giving bad results…Course it all depends on your settings…Not familiar with ‘Ideal’ dvd to avi , but there are others, like AviDemux as well as the already mentioned, FUW…They all pretty much give good results(IMO)…
You’re not going to reduce/compress a file and expect equal or higher quality than the source…
Run some test conversions at different settings, and [I]see[/I] for yourself…

thats the problem
the results are rubbish
but you can get hold of good quality rips so how do you make em?
what settings using xvid/divx are going to get quality results?
and are there some hacks or something to get screenplays playing other formats and large files?

Decrypt and rip the dvd to the hard drive using whatever program you like (AnyDVD, DVDFab, DVDDecrypter, etc.). Personally, I’d just rip the main movie.

Download and install AviDemux. http://fixounet.free.fr/avidemux/ Within AviDemux, open the VTS_01_1.vob file of your decrypted dvd. You will get a little pop up window that says this looks like mpeg…go ahead and let the program index the files and append them (join all the vobs together).

Now you are ready to start setting up for your avi file. Under Video, select Mpeg4-ASP Xvid. Now click on Configure under that. Put Encoding Mode to Video Size (two pass). I suggest using a larger target size than 700 or 800 mb if you want the best quality. If your player cannot handle anything more than 1.4gb, select a slightly smaller size. 1.2gb should be fine. Click OK to close the Configuration window.

Next, under Audio, change to MP3 (lame). Click on Configure to set bitrate…default is 128. Then click on Filters and set the Mixer to Stereo. Click OK to accept these settings.

Finally, under Format, set it to AVI.

Now, at the top of the main window, click on File and Save. Set your output location at this time, and make certain to give your saved file an .avi extension. Once you click ok, you will start the encoding process.

This should produce very good results. Speed is dependent on your computer’s cpu speed for the most part, so if things are going slowly, you need to invest in a better machine.

kool,thanks for that
I’ll give that a try
luckily the screenplay plays vobs so I have ripped a few of my faves umcompressed
but that’ll soon eat the harddrive up so I want to avi the rest
I will try your recomendations this weekend